Neil Young performs at Hollywood's Dolby Theatre on Saturday night in the first of four solo acoustic shows. MIGUEL VASCONCELLOS, CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

There’s been more than one reason lately for fans, particularly less affluent ones, to have grown frustrated with Neil Young.

Take Pono, for instance, the coming audiophile alternative to the iPod that Young, long a stickler for high-quality sound, has helped develop as a sonically expansive but still portable antidote to the compressed flatness of mp3s. Press previews and artist testimonials suggest the process is a small marvel, a means of restoring the dynamic fullness of pre-digital purity for our downloadable times, preserving recordings as intended from their mixing boards, not as cheaply mastered for mass consumption. If the iPod is first-generation DVD, this is 4K Blu-ray.

It also costs $400 per Toblerone-shaped player, is best heard through $250 headphones, and will be run through an online service selling high-resolution albums for about $15-$25 apiece, more than most anything on iTunes. Earlier this month, Young – who told Rolling Stone “I’m not in charge of the business,” that he’s “just the mascot” – unveiled the gizmo at the annual South by Southwest music conference, where he also announced a Kickstarter campaign aimed at raising $800,000 for the project, with artist-engraved limited-edition models to entice pledges.

That ploy pulled in $2.5 million in 48 hours, has since crossed the $5 million mark, and overall seems the smartest possible rollout Pono could have imagined. But that’s beside the point. Plenty of people ranting on blogs and social media, perhaps protectively thinking of Kickstarter strictly as an exploitable tool for struggling artists, only seemed to hear that Neil Young was trying to gather $800,000 and wondered why he didn’t just write his company a check.

Especially seeing as he started the year with a four-night stand at Carnegie Hall that, like his just-begun stretch of equal length at Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, surely garners at least a half-million in ticket sales each show. Face-value rate to sit anywhere in the orchestra section: the price of one PonoPlayer. Not counting fund-raising events, and setting aside how venue size vs. a performer’s asking price can translate into a higher-priced ticket, that’s still more than anyone except the Rolling Stones demands to get within 100 feet of a performance. Maybe Madonna by now, but she’s got a production and crew to pay for. McCartney, Springsteen, Petty, Fogerty, the Who, Fleetwood Mac – they don’t ask $400 even when they’re playing Vegas.

And yet the Dolby price makes some kind of sense: If it will cost you $400 to hear Young’s music in his preferred manner – did I mention it’s among the most brilliant and indispensible that rock has ever produced, and only getting better with age? – then why shouldn’t it cost that much to hear the man himself perform 20 or so of his greatest songs? It’s an even harder contention to shoot down given that the bulk of selections for these prestigious gigs is drawn from his golden era.

For starters, the set list, changing only minimally each night, includes more than one Buffalo Springfield gem. “On the Way Home” was beautifully breezy, if a tad creaky, at the outset Saturday, but “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong” on upright tacked piano late in the second set was breathtaking, paused and restarted after he had a flashback to writing the song nearly a half-century ago mere blocks from where he was sitting. He also transformed “Mr. Soul,” an oft-performed classic, into a slow-pumping piece for pipe organ that ranks among the more biting versions he’s concocted, capped by emphasized “I don’t know” responses to the song’s fadeout query: “Is it strange I should change?”

The remainder of the rundown is heavy on material from his mellow masterpieces: After the Gold Rush (1970), ource of an extra-delicate “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and the still-trenchant “Southern Man,” absent from sets for nearly a decade; Comes a Time (1978), including a tenderly rendered “Goin’ Back”; and most of all his best-selling work, 1972’s Harvest.

Choicest from that country-rock cornerstone were an impassioned “Old Man,” the less-heard title tune, a synth-enhanced handling of “A Man Needs a Maid” that held the audience rapt (when many couldn’t shut up with comments and requests between songs) and a sly, Randy Newman-esque run through “Are You Ready for the Country?” (A few bits of advice for future crowds during this stand: We know you love him, your shouted adoration isn’t very respectful of the artist you claim to admire so much, and hollering out “Cowgirl in the Sand” seven times will not get him to play it.)

He paid tribute to the late great Ben Keith after “Country”: “Sometimes when I’m singing that song, I see all kinds of things. Mostly I hear a slide guitar player who I really love.” As he did at Carnegie Hall, he also saluted songwriter heroes and peers during this Dolby set: In the first half came “Changes” from Phil Ochs (“somebody I thought was a lot better than me”), while the second portion featured a letter-perfect version of “If You Could Read My Mind,” a soft-rock staple from fellow Canadian Gordon Lightfoot.

And as he did the last time he played shows like this in L.A. (1999 at the Wiltern, with far more varied set lists), and has in this setting since he became a solo artist in the late ’60s, Young shared stories, dryly humorous asides and tall tales that said less about the origins of particular tunes or guitars (some from Stephen Stills, one that belonged to Hank Williams) than about his no-nonsense perspective and perpetually fluid creativity.

“Here I am with this old guitar, doing what I do,” he sang at the evening’s outset in “From Hank to Hendrix,” one of two “Harvest Moon” cuts this night (guess what the other was). Sometimes that instrument changed – banjo for “Mellow My Mind,” starkly lilting piano for the hopeful Freedom piece “Someday” and the haunting “Philadelphia,” the one that should have won the Oscar from that film (no offense to Springsteen’s victor). But whatever he chooses to play from his octet of guitars and trio of keys, his roaming loner mode remains the same, and still utterly transfixing, no matter how long it takes him at 68 to warm up his slightly weakened voice for keening notes.

Will it have been worth every penny to those who forked over big bucks to witness one of these rarities? Undoubtedly. Yet the more I kept staring and savoring, the more I couldn’t stop contemplating the price to see such a stunning yet virtually production-free performance. What would the younger Neil Young think a fair price for a man playing guitar would be in 2014? How would the guy who bolted into a studio with CS&N to record and release “Ohio” within a month of the Kent State shootings feel if he knew decades later he’d still be playing it – passionately, inarguably passionately – for $400 a head? Wouldn’t he have something to say about that breeding an elite class of fans?

Or maybe he should ask himself: What would Phil Ochs do?

First set: From Hank to Hendrix / On the Way Home / Only Love Can Break Your Heart / Love in Mind / Philadelphia / Mellow My Mind / Are You Ready for the Country? / Someday / Changes (Phil Ochs cover) / Harvest / Old Man

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